Motorists may soon say goodbye to the hassle of tearing the stubs off parking coupons.

On Monday (May 15), the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA), Housing Development Board (HDB) and the Government Technology Agency of Singapore (GovTech) established a partnership to develop a parking app that allows motorists to pay parking fees through their mobile devices.

Image Credits: GovTech

To perform this digital payment, motorists simply need to use the app to key in their vehicle number, select the car park and indicate their parking duration.

The app also automatically calculates the charges that motorists have to pay based on their parking duration on a per minute basis. A refund will be given if motorists choose to end their parking session earlier.

Parking attendants will be able to use the vehicle’s number plate to check whether a motorist has paid, and if the parking session is still valid.

Additionally, motorists can easily track the validity of their parking session via the app. This means that motorists no longer need to return to their vehicles to add more coupons to extend their parking session.

A trial to test the functionalities of the app will be conducted among public sector officers at 84 selected public carparks in the city, in areas such as Fort Canning and Tanjong Pagar between May and June this year.

The trial will be extended to the general public “later this year” and with the feedback gathered from the trial, the agencies will improve the app for better user experience.

Keeping Up With The Digital Times

Image Credit: The Online Citizen

Parking coupons were first introduced in 1980, and they’re still used at 1,150 car parks.

Fast forward 37 years later, I think it is only apt that we innovate and digitise this payment method.

In February this year, Second Minister for National Development Desmond Lee said in Parliament that coupon parking would be phased out “eventually”, noting that more than 70 per cent of public car parks now use the electronic parking system.

According to a joint media statement by the government agencies, “the Government will continually experiment with new ways of using technology to improve the quality of lives of citizens”.

It also looks like this app will act as a transition step and provide learning points before we actually move to the satellite-based Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) system, which is expected to be introduced in 2020.